Review: Out of the Closet, Into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories (2015)
Farris Wahbeh
Amy L. Stone and Jaime Cantrell, eds. Out of the Closet, Into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2015. 372 pages. Hardcover, $95.00; paperback, $29.95.
One of the tenets of identity politics is that the construction of the self is derived from positions of power (medical, governmental, racial, sexual, etc.), and how those power structures form a dominant language that can be decoded, rearticulated, and deployed as a new set of tactics to articulate one’s own identity within the discursive practice of societal and cultural spheres.
As Judith Butler has demonstrated in Gender Trouble:
“The critical task for feminism is not to establish a point of view outside of constructed identities; that conceit is the construction of an epistemological model that would disavow its own cultural location and, hence, promote itself as a global subject, a position that deploys precisely the imperialist strategies that feminism ought to criticize. The critical task is, rather, to locate strategies of subversive repetition enabled by those constructions, to affirm the local possibilities of intervention through participating in precisely those practices of repetition that constitute identity and, therefore, present the immanent possibility of contesting them.”¹
However, what if finding “local possibilities of intervention” is not possible in a historical and material sense? What if the “practices of repetition” that constitute identity are lost from the historical record?
These two questions repeatedly surfaced as I read Out of the Closet in the most visceral sense, that the archival materiality of non-conforming gender or sexual subjects are figured “outside” the dominant discourses of hetero-normative power centers, such as archival repositories and their historical record.
To that end, this edited volume by Amy L. Stone and Jaime Cantrell is a necessary, urgent, and thrilling account of how historians, archivists, community members, and academics have taken the archival process to task by situating “the queer archival experience within the institution of the archive” (6) while also emphasizing how “LGBT history has queered the archive by creating counterarchives or community-based archives that operate outside of government or academic institutions” (7).
Divided into four parts (respectively, Archival Materiality, Beyond the Text, Archival Marginalizations, and Cataloging Queer Lives), the book is indispensable in illustrating how LGBT, queer, and gender non-conforming histories must be articulated through the archive by reimagining it as a location of visible, invisible, and intersectional possibilities.
All the essays in each section of the volume are cogent and instrumental in representing the topic. For example, Maryanne Dever’s contribution “Papered Over, or Some Observations on Materiality and Archival Method” astutely points out that the physical materiality of archival accumulations have relations all their own (“paper relations” as she phrases it).
In reading materiality as a site of specific meaning, Dever explores a “renewed sensitivity” to archival materials and the “expressive potential of paper [that] can offer alternative ways to approach archival sources and, in turn, the vexed question of what constitutes ‘evidence’ when researching sexual histories, especially given the now well-established limitations of approaches focused on locating and interpreting textual traces of desire” (67).
In Whitney Straub’s fascinating overview of the Gay Male Pornographic Video Collection from the Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University, the author examines a collection of binders that are indexes of gay pornographic films from the 1980s and 1990s that “reconstruct the sexual cosmos of the past” that was an “affective archive, a laborious work of love” undertaken by what he calls the “Archivist.”
By situating this seemingly mundane piece of material culture as a larger strategy to understand a “valuable inside perspective on the creation of erotic meaning at the time of backlash, trauma, and an increasingly homonormative public face of LGBT life,” Straub deftly articulates how what may be construed as immaterial (or ephemeral) is in fact a signifier for what endures of a community.
This is a consistent thread throughout the volume, placing weight on what is lived experience (and the material evidence or lack thereof) as a set of perspectives and strategies for understanding why archival traces and materializations matter. Alternatively, when there is no materialization, why that itself should be investigated.
In Straub’s case, the author acknowledges the Archivist’s lack of representing or, conversely, fetishizing racial diversity in their indexical project as “racial fantasies.” In underscoring that pornographic texts are an “insular dialectic of white desire for a perpetually fetishized Other,” Straub places the Archivist as a case study “in the perpetuation of racialized grids of knowledge within private organizations of desire, power, and pornographic sexuality operative in both straight and gay films” (139).
The editors in their introduction also direct their inquiry as a place for self-recognition of non-represented lives by rooting them in a lived experience. In citing E. Patrick Johnson, they write: “[Johnson] theorizes about ‘quare’ lives, using the signification of his grandmother’s pronunciation of the word queer as ‘quare’ to theorize race at the heart of queer studies but also to signify the culture-specific positionality and specificity absent from an often white-domination definition of queerness” (15). (My only wish for this otherwise wonderful volume would have been an actual contribution by Johnson, as I found myself reading up on their writings after finishing this volume with a gusto).
In Robb Hernandez’s essay “Straight Talk, Queer Haunt: The Paranormal Activity of the Chicago Art Movement,” the author similarly locates the lived experience as a “phantasmagoric happening.” By mining and analyzing transcripts of oral histories from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, Hernandez finds that within the ellipsis and aural significations of what is shared in interviews with artist’s “produces queer knowledge about racialized queer subjectivities in its breaks, detours, and pregnant digressions.” In so doing, the author uses this to unmask the neutrality of an archival program by privileging how sexual histories “prevail, lingering in conversation, gesture, and emotive utterance, thinking through how straight talk can sound quite queer” (198).
I can continue to cite many other nuanced observations, meticulously thought out research, as well as eloquent historical narratives in this volume, but it would do it a disservice. In order to fully understand the scope and scale of how sexual histories surface in the archives and the knowledge production those archives generate, one is to be aware that this process is not organic or self-evident, that it is intentional, must be created and sustained, and to be aware of the strengths of an archive, cognizant of its erasures, and the energy and willingness to do something about it. This volume is a significant map to begin that endeavor.
[1] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 147.
Farris Wahbeh is Benjamin and Irma Weiss Director of Research Resources at the Whitney Museum of American Art
